Mary Wollstonecraft

Life Measured by Courage to Begin Again

Finally, renewal begets legacy. Mary Shelley—Wollstonecraft’s daughter—wrote Frankenstein (1818) amid early bereavements, fashioning creation from loss. So too with Wollstonecraft: her ideas, dismissed and revived across centuries, prove that beginnings can outlive their beginners. In the end, the measure she proposes is less a ledger than a rhythm: pause, learn, and recommence. By that cadence, a life grows not by the permanence of its first draft, but by the courage with which it writes the next one. [...]